


porcelain (in which Misa has always been broken)

by arysthaeniru



Category: Death Note
Genre: F/F, F/M, Stupid Drabbles, i need to write more about this, with my other opinion on misa where she actually believes her own lies, written with painkiller dosed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 10:18:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2769395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arysthaeniru/pseuds/arysthaeniru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Misa finds the Death Note as anticlimactically as Light does. Doesn’t that mean her story should be just as tragic as his?</p>
            </blockquote>





	porcelain (in which Misa has always been broken)

Misa finds the Death Note as anticlimactically as Light does. Doesn’t that mean her story should be just as tragic as his?

She has been hiding in her room for the past three days, since the stalker tried to kill her and failed. It has been a year and thirty-five days since her parents were murdered in front of her eyes. She is tired of death following her. She is tired of corruption. She is a broken porcelain doll, waiting to be swept away with the rest of the trash.

She has hidden in the blankets for the past three days, too hyped up to sleep, but too tired to move. And then the black book falls from the top of an untouched, locked room, enough of a catalyst to knock over her russian dolls and spill those over the floor, noisily as they split open and spill out yet smaller dolls. 

Misa initially jerks away from the noise, waiting to die, ready to be killed. But the killing blow never comes and silence reigns in her dark apartment again. So she crawls out of the blanket pile she has made, the first movement she had made in those three days. And she stares at the book with strange writing on it. 

It’s just a notebook. Just a black notebook, like anything you would find on the street, but Misa picks it up and her whole world changes. 

She is not surprised to see Rem. The shinigami appears in her line of vision, and Misa is so desensitized and dead inside, from her almost death that she just stares up at Rem, with no fear and no real reaction.

"My name is Rem." the shinigami says, after a long pause, where Misa’s brown eyes meet Rem’s cold, otherworldly gaze. "I am a shinigami. You are holding what is known as a Death Note. Any human’s name written in the book, will die."

And just like that, the broken pieces inside Misa uneasily click back together. There are shards missing and she is just a bit too sharp and a bit too fake, but she is whole. 

She smiles up at Rem, hungrily, as she staggers up from the floor, walks away from the death that has not yet come. She needs food, the bathroom and a shower. 

-

She applies her makeup and goes back to work, apologizing for her absence blithely, as she saunters back into her workplace, her hair perfectly dyed blonde and her blue contacts in. Her manager is used to her being flaky, but not like this. Still, he sighs and accepts it, putting her back to work with little more than a weary complaint about her being difficult to work with compared to others.

He is thinking the right things, but for the wrong reasons. 

She models for the camera, pretends to be cute and ditsy and blonde and dumb. She flirts with the coffee boys and winks at the photographer and flashes a little bit of her underwear to her audiences. She is the stereotype of the cutesy, perfect little girl.

It hadn’t been the truth before the stalker and it is even less of the truth now. 

It’s fun, honestly, pretending. She likes seeing people smile like this when they see her kawaii nature, and she relishes in the way that people’s eyes widen when they hear her name. Misa-Misa is a big name in the fashion world and it’s only getting bigger, as it spreads to the mainstream. Cute, pretty, young Misa-Misa. 

But when she goes home, all but the basest mask is dropped, as she brushes her hair in front of her altar of candles and watches the hovering Rem out of the corner of her eyes. Rem has seen Misa at her lowest, but Misa refuses to let Rem see that again. Misa is healed now, by the power of the book, by it giving her autonomy.

No longer is she helpless. She will snatch her fate in her hands, using a fluffy pen and the small notebook. 

She has idolized Kira up until now, as a God, but she sees his power is replicable. We are all gods, Misa’s mother had said once, and Misa had never really understood it until now, with the black book in her hand and the pen against her lips. The power to annihilate the world at her fingertips. How intoxicating. 

Still, Kira is stronger than anyone else. He has started this revolution and done what nobody else could. Had Kira not been here, would Misa have ever picked up this book and used it for justice, for a higher purpose? It is a strong person who gains the power to kill and thinks of the greater good. 

Even if his justice is man-made and not truly what a God in the sky would want, Misa wants to meet this ambitious person, who has remade himself in the name of justice, who has taken revenge for Misa, where Misa could not. The person who killed her parents was evil, evil evil, plain and straight, and so Kira must be good, is good. So Misa has to meet this force of good. 

Rem is helpful in this, with her rumbly voice and her helpful hints and the long stories she is willing to tell at Misa’s prodding. All it takes is an almost-real smile and Rem bends. It is not something she has expected, for a being made of bone, to bend. Bone is brittle and breaks easily, but Rem bends, like a tree in the wind, and Misa wonders whether bone is stronger than she initially thought. 

Perhaps they are not made from the same sort of bone. 

-

She makes her first move with a tape to the world. She has sat and she has pored over every last detail of the Kira case, inbetween filming shoots and while up late at night, rewatching the Salura News broadcasts and the Lind L Tailor incident, putting together what she thinks of him. Rem is helpful here too, with her dry comments that cut to the heart of what Misa is mulling around in her head. 

Misa knows people, but it is easier to manipulate people in front of her than someone whom she does not know. Appearances can tell a lot about a person after all, and she does not know Kira’s face yet. 

But Rem helps visualize things, with the slight breeze from her wings and her cool, focused gaze. Kira is young, this much she knows, and Kira is proud of his work. Kira believes he is God, as much as Misa had once believed he was God. Kira is ruthless when things come into his path. But Kira refuses to kill innocent people. 

Misa does not care about innocents. They are not the stars of the show. They are collateral damage she is willing to pay, in her quest to get to Kira. Her plan involves Sakura TV, for its help in profiling Kira, and she repays them with some blackmail, some deaths of minor people that the real Kira will not target but who deserved it, and some tapes, recorded with the tape recorder of one of her occult friends. 

Rem is morbidly fascinated by what Misa is doing, even if she pretends to be aloof and above it. She is interested in anything Misa does. For all of her cold warning about how she will not die for Misa, Misa is sure that Rem is falling just as hard as the unknown Gelus had. She doesn’t know how to feel about it.

Love is beautiful and dying for love is something perfectly tragic, out of the gothic books that she loves, where the waifelike half-dead girls are pulled to life by their handsome knight in shining armour, who has almost fatally injured himself for his love, and on his dying words, he chokes out his love for her, which up until then he has not realized fully. Those are the stories which Misa had entertained and loved in the interim between her parent’s death and the Note arriving in her life. 

But Rem is not handsome, nor is she a knight. She is not the person who can save Misa. That will be Kira, whom Misa is sure is male, as the great detective L says. 

(she disregards the fact that it is Rem’s arrival with the Note that pulled her together and saved her from her own apathy. she is consumed with purpose now.)

Finding Kira is easy after that, taking the shinigami eyes is barely a blip in the radar, and the pieces fall quickly into place, slotting into place perfectly. And Kira is just the perfect shining knight in armour that she needs. Yagami Light. 

Meeting him is a blow to her ego. She dresses nicely, acts her best, and manipulates him according to his looks and his initial actions as Kira, but Light is just disgusted by her. He does not fall for her, but neither does he hate her very fibre of existence. It is nothing like the gothic novels. He is apathetic to her, thinks she is useless and thinks that her mind is pitiful. It sets her teeth on edge, but all of the waifelike girls struggle in their novels, right?

Right? His threat to kill her if she is not useful strikes fear into her heart, even as she begs to be used. That is what Misa would say, isn’t it? But Rem, dear Rem, dear useful Rem says the words that preserve Misa’s calm. Protection from death. 

Misa places the book down on her dresser, when she gets home and screams at her mirror, pulling at her perfectly bleached hair. This is not what she was expecting.

"He was supposed to love me!" she screams at Rem, her mascara running as she kicks her legs against her expensive dresser. "THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BEAUTIFULLY TRAGIC! NOT THIS…THIS…EMPTINESS!" Light is as empty and untouchable as his name. He does not love her. He will not love her. 

Rem is silent, and her face looks impassive, but her sole eye is distressed. Misa sobs herself empty, until she is collapsed on the floor, back to the little broken porcelain doll from their first meeting. He is not god, he does not love her and does not want her. He is driven by his own ambition, not by the justice she had initially hoped. 

She is broken again. And then, once more, Rem speaks up. “If he will not die for you in love, kill him with love. Will it not be tragic then?”

And Misa’s head comes up, slowly and sweetly, as she smiles again, with broken grace. Kira is not her shining knight in armour. She has set a persona with him for now and she will maintain that, as she has maintained the shiny Misa-Misa model exterior from before. She has sacrificed half of her life for him, anyway, she must be willing to see that through.

But as unconventional as Rem is, Rem is her knight in shining armour, from the books. And Rem is willing to die for her, as Light is not. Misa smiles, with a haunted twist to it. “I love Light. So if I kill him, it will be the perfect tragedy. You’re the best, Rem!” she chirps. Her words feel flat to her, but Rem seems content. 

Misa gets up, wipes away her mascara and goes to bed. The porcelain doll is missing a heart. 

She will neither die for Light, nor for Rem, in the end.


End file.
